It's official, we all sprang from feat of clay

Science backed up religion this week in a study that suggests life may have indeed sprung from clay - just as many faiths teach.

A team at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston said they had shown materials in clay were key to some of the initial processes in forming life.

Specifically, a clay mixture called montmorillonite not only helps fatty acids form little bag structures, known as vesicles, but helps those vesicles use genetic material called RNA - one of the key processes of life.

Jack Szostak, Martin Hanczyc and Shelly Fujikawa were building on earlier work that found clays could bring on the chemical reactions needed to make RNA.

Dr Szostak said: "Not only can clay . . . accelerate vesicle assembly, but assuming that the clay ends up inside . . . this provides a pathway by which RNA could get into vesicles."

In a report published in the journal Science, the researchers said: "The formation, growth and division of the earliest cells may have occurred in response to similar interactions with mineral particles and inputs of material and energy."

But Dr Szostak stressed: "We are not claiming that this is how life started. (What) we are saying (is) that we have demonstrated growth and division without any biochemical machinery. Ultimately, if we can demonstrate more natural ways this might have happened, it may begin to give us clues about how life could have actually started on primitive Earth."

Among religious texts that refer to life being formed from the soil is the Bible's Book of Genesis, where God tells Adam: "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."